"Learairí" is indeed the plural of "learaire", which is a person who hangs around doing nothing, an idler, loafer or layabout. If "Gael-linne" referred to the organisation that promotes the Irish language, I would expect the L to be capitalised. Instead, I suspect the author is making creative use of "Gael" to qualify "linn", which means a period of time. "Linn" is often used with a possessive adjective in phrases such as "lenár linn" = "in our day", "in our lifetime". The use of "Gael" with "linn" means that it is an authentically Irish period of time that is in question, but it's not so easy to come up with a good way to translate it into English while maintaining the idiom. In case you're having trouble with the construction used here ("Tá sé ar..."), it means "He is one of the big loafers of our (Gaelic) day".

Hi Shawn, You're correct, it's a plural; FGB (Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, an immensely helpful dictionary) says it means Lounger or loafer. Singular: learaire (gs. ~, pl. -rí). Gael-Linn is an Irish organization. I believe the sentence in question means "Our Gael Linn is on big loafers", perhaps to say that the organization has a lot of clout; at least that my interpretation. :-) Hope this helps. Best, Maidhc

Maybe the book hasn't been translated into English.

The word is even in the title of this book and also appears in its contents. I tried hacking the meaning off of the web by searching for a Wikipedia entry on the book's title. Of course, the Wikipedia entry is about the author mainly and mentions his book at the bottom. However, whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry did not list the English translation of the book title. Hahahaha Ugh.

I already ran it through Google Translate and it merely returned the word back to me. I guess Google just spit back the same thing because it doesn't have the translation in its database. How useful, huh? Hahahaha. :/ I am guessing it is a plural form though because it ends in -í and therefore might share the same pattern as brionglóid which becomes brionglóidí in the plural. Searching on learair and even learar, give no results though and Google Translate doesn't return anything for those as well. Focloir.ie doesn't have it either or any of the forms that I tried to guess it might have in the singular. :/